


The Jaws of Prophecy

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Smokes, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren Fluff, Bottom Armitage Hux, Chancellor Armitage Hux, Coming Untouched, Darth Tantrum and his Evil Space Ginger, Duel of the Fates, Established Relationship, Fluff with an edge, Force Visions, Idiots in Love, Jealous Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren in Love, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Mildly Dubious Consent, Porn With Plot, Possessive Kylo Ren, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Protective Kylo Ren, Rimming, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, TLJ to DOTF musings, That's Not How The Force Works, The Force, They're so sweet they make themselves sick, Top Kylo Ren, tooth rotting fluff but like evil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:07:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26662687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: “You seem different.” Kylo didn’t mention what he’d seen layered atop reality. Hux would only tell him to shove off and keep his sorcery to himself.“So do you,” Hux said, not without gentleness. “You were gone for a year. A year’s a long time. Then you come back and usurp the bloody throne. Big changes, Ren.”Kylo stroked his hand up Hux’s stomach to his chest and then around his ribs, squeezing.//Just after the battle of Crait, Kylo Ren struggles to find the right place for himself and Hux in everything now that he's the Supreme Leader. Written to lead into DOTF-verse.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 6
Kudos: 200





	The Jaws of Prophecy

**Author's Note:**

> It is what it says in the tags. A 'between the scenes' moving from TLJ to DotF. Tagged for mildly dubious consent bc when do these two ever establish boundaries?  
> [Kylux Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6YRMYaT5fte0cPWH5UVGW5?si=J3LTK6tkRyqlKb_taM7eHg)

“What are you thinking of?” Kylo asked, his brows creased with stirred-up emotions he hadn’t yet sorted through.

“Just a dream, _Supreme Leader_ ,” said Hux, and the whirling thoughts that had confused Kylo were whisked away like blowing out a flickering candle.

“Hux, don’t.”

“You wanted the title so bad. You can have it.” The raw pain of the sentiment was starting to fade. Hux was teasing him. It still made Kylo’s skin prickle unpleasantly.

“Then it’s an order.”

“You’re ordering me to speak plainly?” Hux’s eyes glittered. “Stay out of my head, Ren.” The phrase was comforting even though it had none of its usual bite. Hux looked tired.

“It’s not my fault you were thinking loudly.”

They were seated in the officers’ lounge of the _Finalizer_ , which would have been strange enough on its own to make the other officers cluster on the other side of the room to avoid Kylo Ren: before the destruction of his helmet he never entered the lounge, preferring to eat and drink in the privacy of his personal quarters. In addition to the anxiety his presence had always caused the officers, Kylo was now their new Supreme Leader, a title he was growing to hate the more that Hux used it as a slur. The novelty of Kylo’s face wore off quickly for most of the _Finalizer_ ’s crew, as he wasn’t half as disfigured as most of them had theorized. There was only the long, healed scar the scavenger had given him on Starkiller, bisecting his... _singular_ features.

Hux, the only First Order man to have seen Kylo for any length of time with and without the scar, thought that it didn’t subtract from his looks. The flaw seemed instead to draw attention to the perfection of his other features: the wide, dark eyes and plush mouth, the regal nose. Hux wanted to take Kylo apart and drive the sullen aggression from his stance ever since the first time he saw him unmasked. Seven years ago Hux had been careful to think such things very quietly, but he didn’t bother now, especially after the way Kylo had humiliated him on Crait. Kylo’s face was overly expressive, and there was something deliciously powerful about causing a flush or making his lips tremble outside of Hux’s quarters. Anyone who saw might take it for weakness of a less sordid variety.

Kylo, as if obeying a mental command, pressed his lips together to try and quell the twitch of his face, looking at Hux with the lights of the lounge reflecting in his wide pupils. But then the line of questioning continued. “You had this dream recently? What was it?”

Hux sighed, swirling his whiskey in his glass. “Last night. It was nothing.”

“That big shadow. Who--”

“Someone I used to screw, Ren. A real prick, actually. Satisfied?”

Kylo’s chest heated and the base of his brain buzzed, that old flare of jealousy that happened whenever his mother poured all her attention into her work, whenever his father refused to take him along in the Falcon, whenever Luke doted on another student. In his new life, it happened whenever Hux bestowed his cold and piercing gaze upon anyone other than Kylo. But _this_ was worse, and worse still because Hux obviously read it in his face and rolled those pretty green eyes in reproach.

“Don't act like a child.” Hux chided him, a verbal slap whether he meant it that way or not. Probably he did.

Of the two of them, it was Hux who had any semblance of a romantic past. Kylo had gone to the Jedi as a child and abstained to avoid the selfishness of personal connection, and then had gone to Snoke and the Knights of Ren and abstained to test his will and master his body. Then he had been placed in control of the First Order alongside Hux and mastery of lust had quickly crumbled.

Kylo fell headfirst into all the shameful things he’d avoided for so long, starting with physical passion and ending on even more treacherous ground. Before he knew he’d begun to, he loved Hux too deeply to see him punished for Kylo’s mistake, and so he had buried the memories when he went to Snoke. By the time Starkiller was built Kylo spent every night in Hux’s quarters. Kylo wondered sometimes whether Hux had known the tenets of his training and deliberately sought to dismantle Kylo’s adherence to them, but if that was the case, Hux kept it well guarded in his mind.

“What happened in the dream?” Kylo pressed.

“Drop it.”

“It could be important. It could be a message.”

Hux snorted, letting Kylo know exactly how much he doubted _that_ , and how little he believed it was Kylo’s motivation in asking. He drank again, draining his glass, and beckoned a droid over for a second one. The droid whisked the empty glass away. Hux relented.

“I was back in the dorms at the Academy.”

Kylo nodded, the scenery he’d seen making sense now. The rain beating the windows, the sterile durasteel fixtures of the room. It was barracks style, and Kylo thought he had glimpsed Mitaka in the next bed over. He wondered whether that was dream-logic or if Hux and Mitaka had actually attended together. But he had more pressing questions than those about Dopheld. “You went to school with him? The man?”

“No. I met him when I obtained General rank. It was just a dream. It doesn’t make sense.” _Or mean anything_.

Kylo ignored Hux’s pointed thoughts, wallowing over how recent the fling was. _Kylo_ had known Hux as a General! Had wanted him the moment he saw him, even with that stick-straight spine and spitfire temper. Maybe because of the latter. The glimpse of the large shadowed dream-man Kylo had seen Hux thinking of had been strangely blurred, as if he were shaking his face back and forth more quickly than any man could. As if Hux’s own subconscious didn’t want to remember the face in the dream.

“Did you have feelings for him?” Kylo asked it quietly, barely above a whisper. Emotions weren’t something they discussed alone in each other’s arms, much less in the lounge. _Do you have feelings at all?_ Kylo did, though he shouldn’t.

After the completion of his training, he was meant to be void of vulnerable personal connections. He’d made furious love to Hux before he went, injuries be damned. Hux had been just as frantic, the same thoughts coursing through his mind. Not knowing if they would do this again after. Not knowing how Kylo would come back to him. Kylo had gotten the briefest taste of something warm and bittersweet like honeyed tea from Hux’s mind that night, and had known that this was something above physical release for Hux too. He’d savored that remembered taste like a starving man savors the memory of a feast in his sleepless moments in the Citadel. But Kylo had not been able to draw that warm honeyed thing up in Hux’s mind since his return (and likely never would again after the _Supremacy_ , Kylo thought sullenly). Hux had locked his quarters for a month after Crait, and then Kylo had grown desperate to have it out with him for good or for ill and forced the door open. Hux had welcomed him back into bed and they’d fought in a very different way than Kylo had imagined, clawing each other closer instead of apart. That maddening taste didn’t leak through the connection Kylo drilled in Hux’s skull, and sometimes he doubted he’d tasted it at all.

“I'm in the habit of outliving my lovers,” Hux said, just as quietly. “Don’t be jealous of ghosts.”

Somehow that made it worse. How could Kylo compete with the perfection of death? He drank from his own glass, a sugary cocktail that the bartender would have cracked a joke about if the customer were anyone but Supreme Leader Kylo Ren. The droid returned with another whiskey for Hux.

“Did you dream that you…?” Kylo made an obscene gesture and Hux choked on his first sip and glanced toward the other tables where his men sat like a nervous flock of porgs, but none of them were looking.

“ _No_ , Ren. He was just...there. Just standing next to the other bunks across the way. He didn’t touch me. Just...stared, and I realized it wasn’t him. It looked like him but it wasn’t, because he was dead. A husk or...or a vessel. He was something else entirely, something cold just standing there and watching. Then a purple light started coming from under my bed, and I leaned down to see what it was and...well, it was strange. I’ve been drinking too much caf too late in the day, for weeks now.” Despite his rationalization, Hux looked harrowed as he described the dream.

“You’ve dreamed it more than once,” Kylo said, reading that from Hux’s mind. Hux glared at him. “Is your old boyfriend in all of them?” He tried not to sound too petulant. Hux’s glare deepened anyway.

“No. Other people. All dead people lined up like sentinels next to the bunks on the opposite wall. Father, for one,” Hux said, and checked the time on his datapad. His mind supplied that they were all people _he_ had killed, save the boyfriend, and that worried him. Kylo turned that detail over and over in his mind, insanely jealous of whoever it was that Hux was sitting there stewing over because they'd appeared as a standing corpse in a dream.

“Tell me if you dream it again,” Kylo ordered.

“I’m going to bed.” Keeping to routine, Hux left alone. Twenty minutes later, Kylo followed, turning the other way outside the door and doubling back down another hallway toward the executive wing. He sent out a silent command like a bubble around himself that made officers in its field suddenly want to walk a different direction, and so arrived at Hux’s door unobserved. It was a practiced series of steps, perfected over the years and unchanged with the shift in Kylo’s station. Kylo knew that people gossiped anyway, and occasionally considered telling Hux just to upset him, but he feared Hux would implement more precautions in response, and Kylo hated jumping through hoops just to get Hux’s willing skin under his tongue.

Hux stubbed out the cigarra he was smoking in the lowlight of his room -- he’d ordered the lights down preemptively, wanting to get right to it tonight -- and stripped Kylo in a dozen practiced movements, pulling layers off until his leather clad hands were roaming Kylo’s chest. Kylo’s nipples pebbled up under the friction and he reached for Hux’s uniform, already knowing Hux would slap his hands away. Kylo was fond of ripping the material -- he’d done so on his first night back in Hux’s bed quite spectacularly, reducing Hux’s clothes to ribbons -- and Hux hated requisitioning more. He was running out of excuses to put on the forms. Hux stripped himself down while Kylo shimmied out of his leggings and tapped his foot theatrically at the wasted time Hux spent folding a uniform that was just going down the laundry chute anyway. He certainly wouldn’t be putting it back on. Kylo would see to that.

The moment Hux put the last item in its neat pile on his desk Kylo scooped him up and carried him to bed, laughing at Hux’s shrill complaints because he could feel how much Hux really liked it, and then had him crosswise on the bed. It wouldn’t have been possible on Kylo’s bed, a standard single, but Hux’s was slightly bigger. Everything in Hux’s quarters was bigger. Star Destroyers weren’t built with two commanders in mind. Kylo could have forced him to switch. He knew it made the gossip worse, the fact that he hadn’t done so immediately after his ascension, and he also knew that Hux was silently grateful to keep his old space.

Kylo rolled Hux onto his stomach and went immediately to work loosening him up in his favorite way, licking deliberately slow and teasing passes over his hole, hands squeezing his firm ass hard enough to be nearly painful. Hux cried out, stifling the noise by biting his own arm. There was no reason to; a General’s quarters were soundproofed. It was a holdover from earlier days, earlier partners, and Kylo hated it. He stopped teasing, pushing his tongue into Hux on the next pass and then pulling back to suck kisses in a circle around his rim. He repeated the pattern until Hux was whimpering and then drove his tongue in relentlessly until Hux started trying to rub himself off against the sheets. Kylo stilled him with a hand on his hips and summoned their bottle of lube from its resting place with the other.

Hux was relaxed enough to take two lubed fingers without resistance. The third was a stretch that made him gasp. Kylo slicked his cock and lined up. He usually pushed in slow; he was aware he was uniquely ( _ridiculously_ , his brain supplied in Hux’s voice) large, and he didn’t want to hurt Hux in this way. He’d hurt him in every other way possible by now, of course. The bruises on Hux’s throat were still yellowing. Tonight, however, Kylo couldn’t get the shivering blurred visage of Hux’s ex-lover, _probably one of many, just one in a whole sea of them who thought they were good enough to have this before you when you know it's supposed to be you and him and he LET THEM,_ his brain thought unhelpfully. Without warning, he pushed into Hux in one fluid thrust to the root, grunting at the surprised clench of Hux’s body.

Hux moaned loud, his body arching, his tooth-marked arm forgotten. Kylo felt the stretch and burn in Hux’s mind, and the resulting lightning bolt of pleasure that raced up his spine. “Stars, Ren,” Hux panted. Hux’s mind suggested that he ought to conjure up past flames more often if this was what it got him, and Kylo withdrew and slammed back in, unsure whether he did it to discourage or encourage that idea. He thrusted in short, quick strokes, not pulling out all the way. He listened to Hux’s mental feedback and adjusted the angle until he was hitting Hux’s prostate every time, and Hux’s orgasm built quick, pressure and heat in his cock and then his whole groin, his muscles shuddering. Kylo fucked him into the sheets, providing friction on his cock by happy coincidence. He wouldn’t last long.

“Look at me,” Kylo demanded, kissing Hux’s shoulder and then nipping at it. “Look at me. Hux,” he never tired of the desperate, feral gleam in Hux’s pale green eyes when the man came on his cock.

Hux craned his neck to look back at Kylo in the gloom and Kylo felt his brain liquefy, turning to jelly that would soon begin to drip from his nose like hot slime. Hux’s eyes were wrong. The iris and pupil bubbled lazily, multiplying and floating around his sclera like the trail from an air tube in the cold gel of a bacta tank. The drone of the Dark filled Kylo’s ears. For just a moment the furniture and fixtures in the room seemed to undulate the same way and go purple at the edges, and Kylo pushed himself off and out of Hux, stumbling up and sitting on the bed beside him with his cock still hard and leaking, standing up between his thighs. He felt sick in the stomach.

Hux pawed at him, nudging him until he was leaning against the headboard, and then climbed atop him and gave him a stale-cigarra kiss. His breath was hot. His lips moved wet against Kylo’s. He’d drooled while Kylo was fucking him. Hux guided Kylo back inside him and rode him to completion, fucking himself onto Kylo’s cock with almost the same fury Kylo had used on him. Kylo closed his eyes against the vertigo of the room and let himself be kissed and ridden. His brain stayed a puddle of goo until he came, and then the electric spark of that seemed to zap him back into shape. The pulse of his orgasm twitching against Hux’s rim registered in Hux’s brain and then Hux was coming too, untouched.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Hux said when their aftershocks subsided. Kylo was softening, and Hux dismounted to light himself another cigarra. “Move.”

Kylo scooted over bonelessly to his side of the bed and Hux clambered back in with a lit stick between his lips. The by-the-books General’s habitual fire hazard. Hux’s eyes were normal. Kylo wiped Hux’s spend off his stomach with a corner of the sheet, something that would earn him a glare if Hux were more cognizant. He let Hux go about adjusting his pillow and sitting up against it, and then Kylo curled up with him, resting his head on Hux’s thin chest. On another night, Hux might have pulled out his datapad and continued working, but tonight he looked too fucked out for it.

“How are you feeling?” Kylo asked carefully, cold dread in his stomach at what he had seen and felt. What manner of vision was _that?_

Hux grunted noncommittally around the cigarra in his mouth and stroked Kylo’s hair. He brought his other hand up to hold the cigarra and blow a line of blue-gray smoke out into the room. The smell of it settled into everything here, bitter and acrid. Kylo missed it on the nights, few and far between, that he was banished to his own room. “Same as ever.” Hux said. “Wondering what comes next.” He punctuated that with a heavy sigh and then another long drag. Kylo didn’t have to read his mind to know that he was grieving his defeats. Starkiller more than Crait; the base had been like Hux’s child. They’d fought about the First Order’s next step after Kylo took control. Kylo mused over it now, and unlike their fights before his ascension it was painful to recall.

Hux had avoided him after Crait, ducking down hallways when Kylo approached and spending long hours on the bridge until Kylo resorted to using the Force to invade his quarters one night to speak with him since Hux wouldn’t open his own door. Those days without a glimpse of Hux’s true face, only seeing the polite mask he wore in front of the crew, had been the longest and loneliest days of Kylo’s life. Hux had still been fully buttoned-up, against Kylo’s wildest hopes. He even had his greatcoat on. Maybe he'd known somehow, read Kylo's intentions in him that day even without the Force. Hux was good at that. Practiced. The light of the room illuminated the dark purple bruises on his throat, reaching up over his uniform collar. There were shadows under his eyes, too. He’d gelled his hair back too severely as if to make up for what he could not control.

“Supreme Leader,” Hux greeted him. He looked as if saying the title alone might choke him again. There was venom in his voice. Kylo’s heart panged.

“Stop that,” Kylo said.

Hux blinked and cocked his head, “You’ll have to be more specific, Supre--”

“Stop.”

“Sir--”

Everything not bolted down was flung from its resting place into the walls. The desk broke. “We’re alone. We’re in your fucking quarters. Our _home_ , Hux, please….”

Hux was unshaken by the display. “What do you prefer?” He asked icily.

Kylo grabbed him and kissed him hard, inadvertently pushing him into the wall. He sucked and then bit Hux’s lower lip, practically growling with want. The taste of him was intoxicating; it was everything Kylo remembered and craved. Hux twisted away to the side and Kylo held him fast for a moment, and then let him go. Hux stumbled back and slapped him with all his wiry strength, Kylo’s face snapping toward the wall with the force of the blow. Hux was breathing hard, but quickly regaining that stars-damned composure. That careful wall he’d built up between them in the days after the _Supremacy_. Kylo couldn’t help it. He started to cry. His sorrow started small and then grew, clawing him open. His body shook. He sat down on the edge of the bed and sobbed. Big, gross, unselfconscious sobs.

Hux watched him, his face cold. His lips were kiss-swollen and the spot Kylo had nipped was dark red with blood. Then he thawed, ever so slightly. “Ren,” he said, and there was evident pity in his voice that made Kylo cry harder. “Ren, rouse yourself. We’ve got a war to win. I do hope you have a _plan_ , since you were so keen on your station.”

Kylo did not. It must have been plain on his face because Hux cursed and looked away. Sadness and anger wrestled on his face. Something else won, and Hux had undressed and crawled into bed and fucked Kylo slow until the tears stopped. They hadn’t spoken of it again, though Hux called him Ren, reserving _Supreme Leader_ as a barb. And often alluded, with no small amount of sarcasm, to how anxiously he awaited Kylo’s grand plan. They’d accomplished the destruction of the Republic, winked out with the trillions of lives in the Hosnian system, but the rebels were far from gone. They were only hiding. And there were planets yet to conquer.

“You aren’t wondering,” said Kylo. “You’re plotting.”

Hux hummed an agreement and ran his nails along the flesh in front of Kylo’s ear on his next pass. “I’ve got a few ideas,” Hux murmured. “I’m developing a transmissions blockade with the capacity to span the galaxy. They’ve gone back down into their tunnels like the vermin they are, but cut off from sympathizers they’ll leave a filthy chewed trace somewhere, and we’ll have them.” Hux couldn’t help waxing theatrical occasionally, even when his audience was only Kylo. Another drag, another smoky exhale. Kylo settled his hand on Hux’s stomach.

“Are you cold?”

“Mm. Not yet.”

Kylo floated a blanket over from the closet anyway. Hux’s skin felt chilled. Kylo could not convince himself that what he’d seen meant nothing, but no plausible explanation presented itself either. He said the first thing on his mind. “Are you doing drugs again?”

Hux’s petting paused. “That was _once_ on _leave_ \-- No. Ren, no.”

The first part was a lie, the second was truthful. Or at least Hux thought it was. Kylo pushed the issue. “Spice?”

“Are you trying to piss me off?” Hux blew the next smoky breath down into Kylo’s face, making his eyes water.

“You seem different.” Kylo didn’t mention what he’d seen layered atop reality. Hux would only tell him to shove off and keep his sorcery to himself.

“So do you,” Hux said, not without gentleness. “You were gone for a year. A year’s a long time. Then you come back and usurp the bloody throne. Big changes, Ren.”

Kylo stroked his hand up Hux’s stomach to his chest and then around his ribs, squeezing. He nodded, turning the movement into nuzzling at the end. His absence to complete his training _had_ been a long time. A perilous long time, and then he'd upended everything with no plan. No thoughts, only instinct. And he'd guessed wrong about Rey. He felt sometimes that he was still waking up. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Ren.” Hux waited for Kylo to look at him. “Stop your fretting,” he said fondly. He stubbed out his cigarra, the signal he was about to settle into sleep. Kylo let him scooch down so that they were laying together, and then tangled himself up with Hux again. Hux resumed stroking his hair. “We’re positively domestic,” Hux murmured, his voice going jagged with exaggerated disgust on the last word.

“I’ll pull rank on the bridge tomorrow and you can fume about it,” Kylo said, feeling himself start to drift off.

“That’s not necessary,” Hux said. Kylo didn’t hear it. He was already asleep.

He dreamed he was standing in the halls of the _Finalizer_ , naked and reeking of sex and tabac and Hux’s cologne. Kylo had only just accustomed himself to walking these halls without his helmet and flowing robes, and Hux would be mad at him if anyone saw him like this, if anyone _smelled_ the General on him. He felt an icy spike of panic pierce his gut at the idea of losing Hux’s good favor again so soon. He started to jog toward his quarters, holding a hand in front of his most private parts when he turned corners, but he encountered no one else. The halls twisted and turned, the lights flickering eerily, but when he arrived at the place where the executive wing should be it was just another featureless hallway. The lights flickered out and then back on, emitting a hideous red glow. It dripped down onto him and his skin started to smoke where the light touched, as if it were acid. He started to run, taking turns at random, and then skidded to a halt when he burst out onto the bridge.

The light here was sane at least, but the chamber was far too vast, the bridge of the ship stretched and turned into a durasteel stadium. The stars outside the massive viewports sparkled coldly. On the catwalk, Hux stood waiting. He was naked, too, except for the silvery necklace of his dog tags. His hair glowed almost golden and his skin blue under the lights of the bridge. Kylo had never seen Hux nude in such bright light before, and it struck him now that was likely by design. A situation he was glad to have corrected -- Hux was stunning, unutterably beautiful as he turned his face to the viewports and lifted one arm in a defensive gesture, a victim in a dramatic holovid shrinking away from an offscreen monster. A glowing circular flash erupted in the center of his chest, burning through all the way to his back. It was white-hot and smoking, brilliant purple at the edges.

The viewports all burst simultaneously and what Kylo had taken for open space rushed in, a black and sparkling tidal wave. He could feel the icy temperature of it. Black waves swirled into the space, taking the form of the bridge in rushing whirlpools. The wall of water obliterated Hux where he stood, knocking him down and pulling him under. Kylo tried to rush for him and was swept away too, back the way he’d come, bobbing along in water cold as a winter grave. He thought he felt hands clawing at him beneath the surface.

Kylo woke with a start and found Hux’s side of the bed cold. He stumbled up, calling Hux’s name with a sleep-deadened mouth. Hux stepped out of the refresher, uniformed and ready for the day, and relief flooded Kylo’s body.

“Come here.”

“Ren, I’m needed on the bridge. I can’t be late.”

“I say you can.”

“I’m not your pet.” Hux turned to go, not venturing close for a goodbye kiss -- Kylo would trap him if he did.

Kylo extended his hand, feeling his limbs go cold with fright. His fingers trembled. He knew that dreams were less reliable than waking visions, but this dream was no mere echo of his subconscious. He thought of Hux’s dreams, the ones that also featured a purple light. He needed to change their path. He knew how to do it, inspiration hitting him like a bolt of lightning. _He_ was the Supreme Leader. He could do whatever he kriffing pleased. The old structure of the Order was meaningless.

“Hux, wait. Please.”

For a moment Kylo feared Hux would slip out the door anyway, but Hux stopped. “What?”

“What happened on the _Supremacy_ \--”

“You have nothing to say to me about that day that changes anything,” Hux said mildly, making it plain he would not accept an apology now any more than he would just after Kylo nearly broke his neck hoisting him into the air. Kylo suspected that most of Hux’s objection was a distaste for apologies at all.

Kylo stuffed down the mournful, accusing howl that wanted to rise in his throat at Hux’s hypocrisy, _you drew on me first_ , because they could play that back-and-forth game forever and no one would win. He said the only thing that mattered.

“I need you.”

Hux scoffed. “Have a wank.”

“No, I need you with me. Out there, too.”

Hux’s posture softened almost imperceptibly and he blinked once. “Go on.”

Kylo’s mouth twitched toward a hopeful smile. “I can’t do this alone. The First Order is yours, Starkiller was your machine… Snoke held you back as much as me. I was wrong to hurt you like he hurt both of us.”

Hux’s eyebrows shot up and Kylo heard him think, _Can I get that in writing?_

“You can bring the galaxy to heel.” Kylo licked his lips. “I can help you keep it. It can all be yours.”

Hux eyed him warily, but took a step closer. “You aren’t offering….”

“Rule with me.”

Kylo’s hand twitched, his arm protesting as he continued to reach out. He ached for Hux to take it, like Rey hadn’t. Kylo had been blind -- Hux may not be gifted with the Force, but he was the man whose goals aligned with Kylo’s. Hux’s eyes flicked to his hand and back up to his face. “The First Order would _remain_ mine,” he ventured. “I would have sole command.”

“Yes.” Kylo shouldn’t be giving any ground now. He was offering Hux the promotion of a lifetime. But... _Anything_.

Hux seemed to weigh that. He still wasn’t reaching back. “What of you and I?”

Kylo’s mind stalled. “You can have any title you want.” Heat course through his veins. He knew his face was going pink. “But I was thinking...royal consort?”

“Are you _proposing_ to me?” Hux asked incredulously.

“If you would prefer fanfare--”

“No. Absolutely not.”

Kylo blanched, dizzy. Of course Hux wouldn’t want to marry the man who almost plucked his head from his shoulders in a fit of rage, even if Hux had allowed him to come crawling back into their bed. It hurt, but Kylo would never fulfill his destiny without Hux by his side. He was more sure of that by the second. “A-as I said, any title is yours. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want--”

Hux practically lunged forward to take his hand and pull him into a fierce kiss, cutting him off. “You’re so incredibly stupid,” he said between kisses. His hand squeezed Kylo’s in nearly a death grip. “ _Yes_ , Kylo. Unless you propose publicly...then I’ll put a knife between your ribs. And you’ll come up with something besides consort. I want my own authority, not whatever shadow of it comes from bedding you. Stars, you’ve ruined me.”

Kylo disagreed. Hux was as spry as ever. _His own authority. Chancellor, then_ . “But--” another kiss, “in the throne room, I--” another kiss, “ _Hux_.”

Hux pulled off, flushed, and gave Kylo a patronizing look. “It’s hardly the first time someone’s tried to kill me, Ren. I was going to kill you.”

“You mean--” Kylo let a hand come up to trace the faint yellow bruises on Hux’s throat, and Hux didn’t flinch.

“You went and declared yourself the bloody Emperor and then _didn’t listen to me_ and you let them all get away,” Hux snapped, and Kylo saw that was his true grievance. Kylo closed his hand around Hux’s neck faintly and felt a pulse of heat below Hux’s navel. Kylo’s mouth came open and Hux smirked at him. “I’m not opposed, with rules in place.”

“What a monster,” Kylo said, pulling Hux flush against him with an arm around his waist, “just like me.”

“Unhand me, you brute. I’m late.”

Kylo kissed him breathless but Hux’s resolve didn’t waver. Kylo dressed and they walked to the bridge together with the same space they always kept between them, too close to be casual but careful not to touch. Hux took up his usual position, looking out into space with a calm smile on his face that made his crew exchange startled glances with each other. Kylo stilled, letting Hux look out on their empire, though he shivered thinking of his dreams. He’d put Hux somewhere planetside if he could manage it. He’d give him a crown and hold him above the black poison he’d seen in his mind. _Safe_. Kylo reached out with the Force and put invisible hands on Hux’s waist. Hux didn’t shake him off. The couple’s shadows stretched long and dark over the galaxy, and all the tiny works of men.

**Author's Note:**

> They're both dead at the end of DotF so we'll just pretend they meet up in the afterlife and yell at each other about their respective suicides. Basically I wrote this because I LOVE a good self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm not in love w this story but more content is better than less?? So here it is. ( :
> 
> Btw if I was too vague the 'someone that Hux used to screw' was Kylo Ren and Hux was obscuring the face because everyone else in his dreams was dead and it frightened him to see Kylo there.


End file.
